Reminder for healers

[Kes13a]

You are important for the team if you are in a dangerous situation heal yourself first before anyone else. If you die we most likely will all die depending of the content. I have seen SO many healers dying lately trying to save a party member before themself As a tank if i have to die for you to live i will do it gladly. I litterally cant clear Arcadion 2 with randoms because both healers always dies at like 40% so please if you are hurt heal yourself first

while I would love to oblige you, its in my make-up. heal myself if I have the luxury, keep the tank up always, dps second if at all possible.... sorry, just how my main was raised

[Noox-115]

while I would love to oblige you, its in my make-up. heal myself if I have the luxury, keep the tank up always, dps second if at all possible.... sorry, just how my main was raised

thats fine its all in good intention

[LilimoLimomo]

To be fair, you'd think they'd eventually learn when they die to mechanics after being rezzed while other party members just stand in the fire taking a short little break.

As someone who is friends with a lot of low skill players and has run user testing sessions for games, I would absolutely not think that. Folks who are high-functioning at games like us tend to vastly overestimate the potential of the overall gaming populace; we have so finely honed our ability to identify patterns and solve puzzles that it's hard for us to truly imagine the difference between our abilities and the abilities of others. This isn't a 1-to-1 analogy, but the vibe is very similar to this xkcd comic:



From my experience paying attention to less skilled players, I would say it's far more likely that your average player is barely noticing anything that their teammates are doing outside of "where do I stand to not die". And when these players die, they are more likely to be feeling intense emotions like shame that will cloud their ability to learn anything.

The TL;DR is that it's easy to overestimate what your average player is going to pick up on, and that to truly engage with the reality at play we all need to lower our expectations. Which, to be clear, isn't to say that players can't learn these things; the game just has to be designed in a way that effectively teaches these concepts, and right now it is not doing that.

[lolnotacat]

Words and XKCD....

Maybe I do overestimate some people (which is sad), but I don't think my expectations are misplaced. This is why I specifically said it's fine for sprouts to not understand. In the context of the comic, the average person would be a sprout. Someone who isn't used to the game or the type of skill checks put in place.

But If you manage to get to level cap and the end of the MSQ, by that point you should be able to meet most of those expectations, either by looking things up or watching those around you. In the context of the comic, that's no longer the average person. It's someone who's at least taken some courses on geochemistry.

And to clarify, by expectations I don't even mean mechanics like weaving, clipping, slide casting, snapshots, etc... That's all advanced stuff that you get into when raiding and usually need to be taught. I'd hope that a person that's no longer a sprout would have the ability/curiosity to look at/up their buffs. We've had the transcendent buff since sometime in Shadowbringers. And once again, I don't expect these people to know which attacks go through transcendent (I don't remember them all), just "Oh hey, this buff exists when I'm being rezzed I wonder what it does? Maybe I should look it up or ask."

The one thing I'll agree with you on is that the game can be better about teaching certain concepts, but it probably shouldn't be "If you die, you get rez immunity!" instead it should be, "Hey things happen in-game, you'll get buffs and debuffs. Pay attention to them." Though maybe the game does teach that now? I don't know. I can't remember when I've actually done guildhests.

[Cyllia]

You are important for the team if you are in a dangerous situation heal yourself first before anyone else. If you die we most likely will all die depending of the content. I have seen SO many healers dying lately trying to save a party member before themself As a tank if i have to die for you to live i will do it gladly. I litterally cant clear Arcadion 2 with randoms because both healers always dies at like 40% so please if you are hurt heal yourself first

This always fascinates me because I never have these issues lol

[SongOfTheWind]

Maybe I do overestimate some people (which is sad), but I don't think my expectations are misplaced. This is why I specifically said it's fine for sprouts to not understand. In the context of the comic, the average person would be a sprout. Someone who isn't used to the game or the type of skill checks put in place.

But If you manage to get to level cap and the end of the MSQ, by that point you should be able to meet most of those expectations, either by looking things up or watching those around you. In the context of the comic, that's no longer the average person. It's someone who's at least taken some courses on geochemistry.

And to clarify, by expectations I don't even mean mechanics like weaving, clipping, slide casting, snapshots, etc... That's all advanced stuff that you get into when raiding and usually need to be taught. I'd hope that a person that's no longer a sprout would have the ability/curiosity to look at/up their buffs. We've had the transcendent buff since sometime in Shadowbringers. And once again, I don't expect these people to know which attacks go through transcendent (I don't remember them all), just "Oh hey, this buff exists when I'm being rezzed I wonder what it does? Maybe I should look it up or ask."

The one thing I'll agree with you on is that the game can be better about teaching certain concepts, but it probably shouldn't be "If you die, you get rez immunity!" instead it should be, "Hey things happen in-game, you'll get buffs and debuffs. Pay attention to them." Though maybe the game does teach that now? I don't know. I can't remember when I've actually done guildhests.

Curiosity and wondering and looking things up - all traits which are not default package for every person. And even if it is for some areas (like their other hobbies or work-related activities), the game might not be part of the same mindset. I think expecting players to look up unknowns just because they played long enough a game which doesn’t really get any more difficult - is misplaced, sadly. The best you can do is share knowledge yourself and hope for the best.

[Tigore]

@ Tint

I mean, I can see both points of the arguments for the 5 second raise rule and the tanks taking it too far on the tank pull rule.

The 5 second raise rule I think I was just observing my buffs one day to find out. At first, I usually tried to time my accept as DPS after a dangerous mech is done. Eg. Don't accept on a certain earth boss in Shadowbringers until the triple spam of Fault Zone / Massive Landslide is almost done. 5 seconds is still a short amount of time, so I try to use something like Benediction and Tetragramaton for those times a DPS accepts my raise.

For the tank pull thing, it needs more context to see who is in the wrong. Although it is not well taught both here and Warcraft. The first person to pull will have all the initial aggro / enmity / hate of all enemies. If this happens by accident, at the very least drag the enemies to the tank so their supposed easy single AoE can actually save you. It it also very awkward to purposely drag the second group from Narnia back to group 1. Barely any damage is being done from the person dragging anyhow, so it may be better to ask the tank to try out a big pull. If they are interested, suggest to them that they generally just need to pop 1 major defensive at a time if the healer is using 1 at a time too.

[AmiableApkallu]

And to clarify, by expectations I don't even mean mechanics like weaving, clipping, slide casting, snapshots, etc... That's all advanced stuff that you get into when raiding and usually need to be taught.

I'm not comfortable classifying all of that as, "advanced stuff for raiders."

In particular, snapshotting — the disconnect between "the orange puddle" and "the attack's 'actual' animation" — is an important part of understanding whether you'll be affected by a mechanic, across all levels of content. There is nothing intuitive about getting hit by an attack when it looks like your character was a million miles away from the attack's 'actual' animation.

I also believe that players would be better served by the game explaining how Weaponskills and Spells (GCDs) generally share a "global cooldown," but Abilities (oGCDs) do not. The game should at least hint that the player might be able to take an action in the period of time between an action's cast interval and recast interval.

[lolnotacat]

I'm not comfortable classifying all of that as, "advanced stuff for raiders."

In particular, snapshotting — the disconnect between "the orange puddle" and "the attack's 'actual' animation" — is an important part of understanding whether you'll be affected by a mechanic, across all levels of content. There is nothing intuitive about getting hit by an attack when it looks like your character was a million miles away from the attack's 'actual' animation.

I also believe that players would be better served by the game explaining how Weaponskills and Spells (GCDs) generally share a "global cooldown," but Abilities (oGCDs) do not. The game should at least hint that the player might be able to take an action in the period of time between an action's cast interval and recast interval.

The reason I say those are advanced is because they probably can't be consistently taught in game by a tutorial. It might be something that can be mentioned, but because all those mechanics are reliant on ping and how it interacts with the game's netcode, everyone's experience will be wildly different. Hell, even for players that do understand them, they're so greatly effected by ping that they can completely change the gameplay experience. When I moved from Vegas to Southern Texas, my ability to double weave, and the timing for snapshots and slidecasting were all drastically changed.

[LilimoLimomo]

But If you manage to get to level cap and the end of the MSQ, by that point you should be able to meet most of those expectations

I get why you'd think that, but when you actually look at the bare minimum that's required to complete the MSQ, there's almost nothing there. You can complete your dungeons and trials by having your lifeless body dragged to the finish line by more skilled players. Which means that solo content is the only thing that truly tests players. And the bulk of what solo instances test players on is "when you see this, stand here" and "when you see that, don't stand there". And when that turns out to be too hard, you can play them on Very Easy difficulty.

When solo instances have any kind of mechanic that's more complex than that, there's always pop-up text that tells the player what to do, because the devs know they haven't taught players anything so they can't expect them to know anything.


...And as a bit of an aside, your average controller player probably doesn't even know how to look at their buffs; it's a surprisingly inaccessible and inconvenient process to do so (as someone who actually wants to look at their buffs and debuffs, it truly sucks).