Quote Originally Posted by Rebeccubus View Post
I do want to ask one thing of this. At least in casual content, isnt it okay to NOT track all your damage stuff? Having optimization beyond what casual players are comfortable doing is okay, they shouldnt feel pressured to do what isnt comfortable (within reason, which of course everyone has a different take on where that is). Taking away tools for hardcore players to play with feels like only a loss for them and not much of one for casual players who couldve just ignored them anyway.
Yes, the developers could have just left it and said "it's fine if some players don't engage with the damage buttons", since that's really the approach now anyway with them being taught to spam Cure > Cure II or Adlo.

The reason I think that they changed it from Stormblood was actually because I don't think it was intentional for healers to have all these attacks. Let me explain...
  • White Mage had an older Aero DoT, intended for use below level 50.
  • White Mage had a separate DoT they got, clearly intended for higher levels. But you could actually apply both!
  • White Mage had an AoE Aero, clearly intended... for AoE. But this meant you could apply three Aeros.
  • It was pretty clear they had different intended use cases, one of them really needed to be an upgrade, and the many Stone attacks technically had different use cases (applying different status effects for example) but in reality it was ideal to have a priority macro to use the highest level Stone available.
  • So SE fixed all this by creating the trait upgrade system we have now.
  • SCH had a bit of a different problem. It inherited all of Arcanist's actions, which were intended for Summoner and SE didn't really intend for Scholars to care about. Which is why they will never make a class split into multiple jobs again. This wasn't intended and it was their mistake all these actions were available to Scholar, and they seemed to find it challenging to solve it (ended up being as simple as changing the Affinity).
True, however it is definitely less so, and a tank in a dungeon can be ressed where a healer usually cant. Meaning they get to keep playing the game and can participate in the team again.
We have Red Mages and Summoners to rez as well. Maybe the increase in the amount of jobs over the years has diluted how often you see Red Mages or Summoners, but when Stormblood came out, Red Mages were everywhere and rezzing a healer was possible most of the time due to it. Their popularity has dwindled over time but that's probably in part due to variety of jobs now.
This is good, yes. I like people being resilient to difficulty and I do not want the solution to be making everything easy to clear. I simply thing that the balance of responsibility needs a LITTLE adjustment, not a complete overhaul.
While I agree, the truth is there are people playing the game purely for the story or for social reasons and are completely hopeless at games, and I think that's the primary reason that the main story has to have a mode of some form that makes it possible for them.
And ironically we see the opposite issue in a lot of savage fights of the last expansion where a SINGLE death meant a wipe because mechanics were designed to obliterate you if you didnt have everyone up.
Well that is Savage. I wasn't referring to Savage. But if you get ARR, Heavensward or Stormblood fights and scale them up (like we have with Unreals), the difference is clear between then vs now. A major part of the difficulty in those fights in the past was needing to rely entirely on the healers to keep you alive, whereas now a Warrior can use Shake It Off and numerous self-heals to make fights like Sofia and Ultima way easier. Although they still need the healer in these fights usually, it is still a big advantage over how it was in the past.
Damage also got really really bursty with like raidwide damage back to back to make sure you couldnt survive without a healer. Once again they chose a bad solution to a problem.
I feel like people really did ask for this. SE, who felt they had attempted this before, tried making it rougher in Abyssos so they could say "we told you so" when healers started avoiding PF.

The raidwide back-to-back thing though has always been in Savage really. Usually as a soft enrage mechanic in particular.