SGE/RPR feedback thread crosspost

[IDontPetLalas]

Frankly I can see both sides of the argument about Sage.

It does feel like they totally baited players by telling them it would be some ‘offensive-oriented healer’ that ‘heals through damage’, then it came out and it’s just Scholar again lol. It barely differentiates itself from the other healers and Kardia is just an invisible fairy less abilities. That’s not going into things like making Toxicon II a dps-loss but also making it pretty much the only heal-dps interaction the job has. Hell, White Mage is arguably more of an ‘offensive healer that heals through damage’ with Lily/Misery management and alignment.

On the other hand though, anytime SE talked about Sage before release, I always assumed it came with the caveat of ‘offensive healer… in the content of ffxiv ’. Which, while ultimately disappointing, makes how it actually came out start to make a sad amount of sense.

Personally I feel like the fact they made so little effort to differentiate it from Scholar hurts Sage a lot. I can honestly forsee them creating another ‘Heavensward Bard/Machinist’ style buff war in future. They’re so extremely similar that basically any kind of individuality puts one ahead of the other, so the devs will have to spend the entire expansion constantly rebalancing them throughout to try and stop them constantly overtaking each other.

I think you make some very good points. I would have to say that my expectations were along the lines of an ‘offensive-oriented healer’ that ‘heals through damage’, although the initial trailer was less than impressive- aside from pretty animations- and as you say it was pretty much as SCH clone. So I would go into the 'lukewarm' or the 5/10 camp - has promise, however needs work.

[WaxSw]

But in that thread...the vast majority of posts seem to be really happy with SGE. Some wish it was a little more DPS focused, but are praising it at the same time, and many are outright praising it with no caveats. RPR, oddly enough, seems to be getting the (slightly) more mixed reception, but FFXIVDiscussion seems to actually like SGE a lot. I was not expecting that.

Literally the most upvoted post by a wide margin is a complaint on SGE and the 2nd most upvoted is a sarcasm answer that says that War does the offensive healer fantasy better regarding to Sage while the most upvoted RPR is a praise

As IDontPetLalas said, its an "interesting" way of evaluation that reminds me of that speedrun thread

[Renathras]

You have a interesting way of evaluating "happiness"

As I've said before many times, up/downvotes aren't a good metric, individual posts are. The people most opinionated are actually writing posts, and unless a site has an extremely robust upvote/downvote system (where it logs the users and IPs that they came from to establish there is no cheesing the system AND where every poster is required to rate every other post - in other words, something that never happens), it's not worth much. Too many times, you have certain groups prone to brigade up/downvoting things while more moderate people just make their own post and move on, maybe just skimming a few other posts.

When I read through all the comments (when I first posted it, I read all the way down), there were more individual posts praising SGE than posts dunking on it, and even most of the negative posts were "I would like it to have a bit more DPS focus, but I like it overall and think it's a good baseline" sorts of comments.

Yes, there are some more negative in tone, but there were a lot very positive. It seems the overall consensus, if such a thing exists, was "It's a better SCH".

Regardless, the point was, compared to here, a lot more seem happy with it. I trust you find that an acceptable evaluation, considering the number of people here who will praise it is...maybe 3?

[ForsakenRoe]

"It's a better SCH".

Then the issue is that we didn't actually get a new healer, we got 'a healer we already have, but with the clunk addressed', in which case, why did we need to add SGE, instead of just making SCH have less clunk in its kit directly?

Besides, if the prevailing opinion is 'it is a better SCH', that means that the opinion of SGE is now contingent on the opinion of SCH. So, if the opinion of SCH was 'it's god awful and needs to be deleted from the game', for example, then 'SGE is a better SCH' is not a high bar to clear. But we don't know what the prevailing opinion of SCH is because it wasn't asked, so now we have an equally nebulous 'opinion' of SGE that requires clarification, and likely isn't going to get any. So we've gone in a circle.

Also, I would argue that while only the people who hold stronger opinions would feel moved to write a comment, the accessibility of 'hey I agree with this, upvoted', literally a single click, means that up/downvoting things can be used as a fairly reliable metric of 'I agree/disagree with what was said here'. Sometimes people brigade the post and massvote it, but those instances are few and far between, not often enough to taint the concept. I see plenty of times where someone posts an idea on, say, the OSRS reddit, for a new minigame or skill training method, and if it's trash bad, it gets downvoted, and if it's good it gets upvoted. I don't recall seeing something that was undeniably bad design get upvoted, for example. And OSRS is one of the most 'I don't want any changes to my 25 year old game' games there is, so these suggestions get subjected to rigorous scrutiny on the regular

[IDontPetLalas]

As I've said before many times, up/downvotes aren't a good metric, individual posts are. The people most opinionated are actually writing posts, and unless a site has an extremely robust upvote/downvote system (where it logs the users and IPs that they came from to establish there is no cheesing the system AND where every poster is required to rate every other post - in other words, something that never happens), it's not worth much. Too many times, you have certain groups prone to brigade up/downvoting things while more moderate people just make their own post and move on, maybe just skimming a few other posts.

When I read through all the comments (when I first posted it, I read all the way down), there were more individual posts praising SGE than posts dunking on it, and even most of the negative posts were "I would like it to have a bit more DPS focus, but I like it overall and think it's a good baseline" sorts of comments.

Yes, there are some more negative in tone, but there were a lot very positive. It seems the overall consensus, if such a thing exists, was "It's a better SCH".

Regardless, the point was, compared to here, a lot more seem happy with it. I trust you find that an acceptable evaluation, considering the number of people here who will praise it is...maybe 3?

While this will doubtless fly over your head again, you are not the only person who is appreciative of how Reddit can upvote or down/vote comments, and indeed I (and probably others in this thread) did not simply count votes, but (gasp) actually read the comments as well - even all the way down.

Shocking, isn't it, that we aren't as shallow as you think?

[Renathras]

Then the issue is that we didn't actually get a new healer, we got 'a healer we already have, but with the clunk addressed', in which case, why did we need to add SGE, instead of just making SCH have less clunk in its kit directly?

Honestly, no idea. I'm kind of with Ty that they probably initially were designing SGE to be more like the PvP version but, late in development, decided not to for some reason and kind of scrambled for the nearest exit and made "a better SCH" kind of by accident more than by intent. It's just a hypothesis, but seems reasonable.

What people seem to like about it is that it's smooth and not really clunky, which is the opposite of what most people who pine for SB healers want. In a way, or perhaps an ideal (*cough*4healers*cough*) world, they'd have made SGE and shfited SCH away from what it is back to what it was to appeal to both groups. Both those that like what SCH has become (SGE) and those why liked what it used to be (SCH). Of course, they didn't, so...who even knows. But the end result is that SGE seems to be broadly popular.

While this will doubtless fly over your head again, you are not the only person who is appreciative of how Reddit can upvote or down/vote comments, and indeed I (and probably others in this thread) did not simply count votes, but (gasp) actually read the comments as well - even all the way down.

Shocking, isn't it, that we aren't as shallow as you think?

When I say people attack me, this is the kind of thing I'm talking about.

I can only reply to what you posted - which was you mentioning the most liked posts based on number of likes - not what you may have done...but didn't say in your post. I can't reply to what you didn't say:

Check out the highest voted post. at 111 up-votes, it out-weighs all of what I would consider as clearly positive vote (e.g. I love sage, sage is 10/10, buttery smooth)

...

Agreed, there are also positive ones , looking at them quickly I found three that totalled up to about 75.

So a quick review would tell me that it's not so much a "so many people are happy" but that it's a mixed bag. Yes, some people do like Sage, and some really like Sage, but a significant amount, possibly a majority, have issues with Sage. It's not what they expected, they may like some aspects, however they want to changes.

Note the parts I emphasized with underlines. You talk about counting the votes, and then "a quick review" and "looking at them quickly"; quick review/looking at them quickly doesn't mean "read all the replies in the thread".

You can't fault me for having the wrong take on your post when your post itself presents things that way.

[ForsakenRoe]

What clunk was there in SB on healers? I'd argue there's more clunk now for SCH than there was in SB, specifically because they removed Rouse (buffs the fairy) and added Seraph (replaces the fairy with a separate entity, with a separate action queue), leading to potential ghosting of actions. If you'd said HW, I'd agree, Cleric was clunky, but SB? Really?

Or is this another case of 'the entire worldview is tainted because it was only experienced through the lens of WHM', because if I (and probably others) are going to say SB was not clunky, and you say it is, having mainly played WHM at that time, surely the issue lies with WHM specifically? Which just proves again that SE's idea of the 'pure healer' is the heart of the problem

[Renathras]

What clunk was there in SB on healers?

On SCHOLAR specifically?

Even more ghosting, less responsive Faerie, worse AI on Eos (somehow even worse AI on Selene, and to this day I'm not sure WHY), Dissipation meant you had to resummon your Faerie once it finished, the various iterations of Aetherflow, the various iterations of Miasma 2, some issues with clipping to use oGCDs (particularly Deploy, though you could also deploy Succor off of Selene, which was cool...but also clearly not intended and yet more clunk). Oh, and the macros for pet abilities. Some people loved them, but everyone said they were clunky at the time and many people wanted something else. That's the entire reason Aetherpact was introduced in the first place, specifically to address that issue.

One of the consistent points of praise for SCH in both ShB AND EW was that it became progressively less clunky with each expansion. Even people badmouthing SCH in ShB largely did say they liked the pet AI and ghosting improvements, as they were worse in SB.

It's somewhat odd to me you're asking this since it's long been pretty standard accepted and stated by everyone I've ever read that SB's SCH was more clunky. You're...the first person I've ever seen say the opposite. Don't get me wrong, people praise SB SCH all the time. That isn't at all uncommon. But until this discussion, I thought everyone agreed it was more clunky. Interesting you're holding the contra position now. Guess it is in vogue, though, to say everything possible must be worse with no exceptions. But no, the common perception at the time was that SB was more clunky, and with EW's launch, SCH's pet AI improvements and general usability were praised, even by people that still felt the Job was weaker than its SB (skills) incarnation.

And I mained SCH, not WHM, in SB.

If you think it was less clunky in SB than now, I'm not going to try to convince you otherwise, but there was absolutely clunk and this was openly discussed going into 5.0 at the time, so it's kinda weird you missed that...

[ForsakenRoe]

I'm not arguing there was zero clunk, just that I remember less in those days than in SHB and onwards. I think I've ghosted more actions in SHB and EW than all of ARR/HW/SB because of Seraph. The only thing you list that I'd fully agree was pure garbo clunkjank was Dissipation, and it still is to a degree

Maybe I'm just bad at SCH and it's user error who knows

[Sebazy]

I'd argue that allowing Eos or Selene any opportunity to actually auto cast anything was the only user error here

In HW I used a Corsair K90 with it's big macro key bank to force mash Embrace on the target of my choice, this was coupled with another macro key that would pause the embrace spam long enough for Whispering Dawn to cast. That paired with habitual /place usage saw me with little to no issues. I will note that in Sol at least, the consensus amongst the SCH mains was that it was better to let Selene autocast her haste buffs. Eos was full manual all the way.

For SB I switched to a K95 and had trouble getting the same macro setup to work so instead bound my arrow keys to gamepad buttons and had the macro keys mash that to drive Embrace spam instead. I distinctly remember not needing a pause macro for WD which is an improvement I guess? I also distinctly remember feeling like I dodged a bullet with my habitual fairy placement micro managing, was an auto following fairy canceling it's casts or something? Dissipation was indeed absolute dogs**** though. I flat out refused to use it or it's opener.

I'm with Roe on Seraph for sure, that thing ate Eos cooldowns for breakfast and I'm glad I stopped bothering with SCH shortly after.