Quote Originally Posted by Kes13a View Post
so what your saying the entire game has to cater to bottom of the barrel people. everyone else just has to put up with it being dull and boring or.. leave
The concept of a job being both accessible to the 'bottom of the barrel', with multiple design elements that aid said 'bottom of the barrel' players to be less 'bottom of the barrel', while also allowing more skilled players to explore additional depth within the job's kit... apparently, those two can't coexist in a single job kit. Either a job is 'turbonerd sweaty max parses or kick' complicated, or it's 'babby's first <role> job'.

It's not that hard to design a job that appeals to both sides. SE manages it with various DPS or Tank jobs on the regular. You can clear a dungeon on PLD by just spamming Total Eclipse. OR, you can do the full 'proper rotation' that you'd use to clear Savage. DPS are in a similar boat, they can spam Doom Spike on everything (even bosses) and while it would take longer to clear, you would still clear. Healers, meanwhile, ooh if we give them an extra button to press they'll be too busy looking at their hotbars and not at our HP bars!

The double standard between Tank and Healer is disgusting. We've all seen plenty of Tanks eat TBs raw with zero mitigations. Yet that role does not see 'DPS simplification' to the extent Healer did in SHB. I personally have had a DRK Tank say 'I will not mitigate the TB, because I have too much stuff to weave in my 2min window, and this is the 6min so it's with Potion too'. He used a few more swearwords than I write here, but point is, he specifically said 'I will not do the Tank role things expected of my Job, because I am prioritising doing damage over all of that'. And to be fair, it was pre-nerf P8S so he was justified in hindsight, but my point remains: Tanks focus too much on DPS, they not only get away with it, SE continues to encourage it via adding new damage actions. Healers dare to ask for a crumb of what we once had to return? We get belittled, called names, blamed for things that aren't even our fault (like how the terrible healer players in PFs are somehow the strike's fault instead of SE's), and we're told to 'play a different role'.

I don't want to play a different role. I want to play the role I picked when I started raiding, the Healer role which has a very modest selection of damage actions, and has a fun and rewarding gameplay loop of balancing keeping the party alive, with contributing to the damage dealt to the boss. Now, if I want to have that vibe from a Job, of balancing my healing with my damage, and a 'modest damage kit', it feels like Dancer might fit more accurately than some of the healers. And maybe Red Mage. Seriously, up until DT gave WHM Divine Caress, DNC had more ways to protect the party from raidwides than WHM did. Even now, DNC's two mitigation tools (Shield Samba, Improvised Finish) are separate, whereas WHM's are tied together, so DNC still retains 'versatility' in where/when to mitigate, compared to WHM. It's like the devs just... can't accept the prospect that their idea for WHM to be the 'pure healer' is just... bad, when placed into the encounter design of this game. It'd probably do pretty well in a triage game like WOW's raids, what with Freecure, Asylum (cough Healing Rain) and Lilybell, but FFXIV raiding is not a triage game. And that desire to keep WHM as 'the pure healer', who focuses on big HPS, bleeds into the other healers, giving us things like SGE who responds to a raidwide with a 900p AOE heal (Zoe Pneuma), instead of a more thematic 'use multiple Augmentation CDs to manipulate Kardia's strength, make it AOE, etc. then use attacks to trigger that Augmented Kardia to heal the party'

Damn rereading this, I got really sidetracked