Don't get rid of Protect

[whiskeybravo]

From the 8/10/17 Live Letter

Q: With role actions, each of the jobs are now able to take various actions; however, for healers, there are important role actions such as Protect and Esuna, so I am having trouble deciding on what to set. Do you have plans to increase the amount of role actions that can be set?

A: There are no such plans at the moment.

For Protect, it’s becoming increasingly rare that it’s not used. We debated until the very last adjustments were made discussing if it makes any difference if we kept or removed this spell. For this, we would like to make considerations based on player’s feedback.

Please don't get rid of Protect. Even it's effect is debatable, it's a staple Final Fantasy spell. In fact, you could double down on this idea and consider giving us a Shell ability, as well!

#jokingnotjoking
Turn Shake It Off into Shell it Off. Come on, Warrior needs some utility. A 20-30 sec party Shell buff wouldn't break anything but at least give them something cool and unique. Just an idea :P

Thoughts?

[Snow_Princess]

Make it baseline or get rid of it. I mean if you think about it, it lasts for 30 minutes, one button for 30 mins, in this view it can be simply seen as button bloat. It is taking a spot in role actions when it does not need to be.

Naming an ability called shake it off made me die inside and is cringe worthy, I do not care if it makes all my retainers have cap gil, give me all the mounts in the game, give me a house in every ward... etcetc It is still a cringe worthy name.

[Serilda]

It needs to be removed and retooled. There are several long threads about this already in the healer forum and the two best suggestions IMO are:

1. Remove it, repackage it like the PVP one (short term defense buff for emergencies) and give it to WHM which is already down on abilities and buffs anyway.

2. Keep it, but change it from being an active spell to being an aura around the healer so it cannot be swapped in and out with a macro, making a mockery of the entire role skill system.

I'm fine with either. The second is an innovative idea and avoids needing to rebalance defense values to accommodate the lack of Protect. The former feels more interactive. It also opens the door for Shell to make a return in future (it used to exist as a trait upgrade for Protect!)

But the current Protect sucks and needs to go. If it has 100% uptime then it has no reason to exist in the first place, and its current design means it should never not be up.

[Skivvy]

I'd be OK with it going away. It truly is a "set it and forget it" skill - so why bother having it in the first place? Is that single button click every 30 minutes worth taking up a spot?

Yes, if people die, you do have to recast it....but then you don't think about it again after that.

[Connor]

I love the Protect spell too but personally I find it to be more tedious than anything else. Having a skill to use once then swap out with a macro for something actually useful seems pointless; why have it in the first place?
I think a good idea for it would be to make it increase a target's defence or reduce the damage they take for a short duration (15-30 seconds?).
This would mean actively having to plan and use the skill as well giving it use in actual combat.

As for your last suggestion, I don't play Warrior so my experience of it is limited, but I don't think giving Shake It Off a 'Shell' effect would fit Warrior very well. Keep in mind that this effect does already exist in a capacity as the Bard's buff Troubadour's Minuet. I think buffing it in a way that makes sense for a Warrior would be more useful, such as having some sort of DPS or HP-altering effect on the user

[Serilda]

I think a good idea for it would be to make it increase a target's defence or reduce the damage they take for a short duration (15-30 seconds?).
This would mean actively having to plan and use the skill as well giving it use in actual combat

It could go to CNJ at a low-ish level without any lily requirements, and finally give them some kind of temporary pseudo-shield effect after having Stoneskin unceremoniously ripped away. Benison is ok for endgame, but early on you have absolutely nothing other than reactive healing which is sort of boring and often impractical whenever synced content is required. The two abilities seem to work well together in PVP.

Then all healers would benefit from the newly-vacated role skill slot which could go to something genuinely imaginative and help make the healer role skill choice deadlock a bit less depressing.

[whiskeybravo]

There are several long threads about this already in the healer forum..

My bad. I did look for one but maybe it was buried or perhaps I just overlooked. They said they wanted community feedback so here it is lol

I'm not a healer so I suppose the tediousness of "once every 30 mins" isn't all that apparent to me.

Maybe it would be better it was simply a 30-sec or so buff. I mean it is cool that it's a 30 min buff, like if you do a dungeon and finish, get out and go do some so fates or hunts, whatever, you still have a buff. And that in and of itself is kind of neat IMO. But making it a temporary buff would certainly seem to make it more interactive for healers.

[Serilda]

I'm not a healer so I suppose the tediousness of "once every 30 mins" isn't all that apparent to me.

It's not that casting it is tedious in itself, it's that you have to reserve a button for it and it has zero interactive thought needed. And the only time you ever need it outside of the start of a run is if someone dies - and in most cases, even if someone dies it doesn't actually matter all that much if you recast it or not. This has led to a situation where a lot of career healers simply write a macro in the game which casts Protect at the start then swaps it out for another, more interesting role skill instead for the rest of the run, effectively giving them 6 role actions instead of 5 since Protect only needs casting once. It's silly, and clumsy. It was a classic WHM spell, then the WHM version was just better via traits, then it was made equal for balance reasons, then it was stripped away from WHMs entirely and moved to the role system, then the community made it redundant even as a role choice through a simple in-game macro.

S-E blatantly have no idea what to do with it any more. It needs help. On the example you gave, one of the things I liked in FFXI was that you could cast it on other people (e.g. new players doing FATEs) which had a similar effect to the leftover Protect persisting after a dungeon, while the FFXIV version is strictly party-only due to its design. It made me feel cool as a healer to be able to give strangers a boost, but now Stoneskin, my only fallback, is also gone. There's so much potential for Protect to be less lame than it currently is without destroying balance

Anyway, as you said it's good to give feedback. I don't hate the idea of Protect, just the current design. The PVP version already exists so tweaking that to be balanced for PVE would be so easy to do, and so much more interesting in terms of interactivity.

[Snow_Princess]

My bad. I did look for one but maybe it was buried or perhaps I just overlooked. They said they wanted community feedback so here it is lol

I'm not a healer so I suppose the tediousness of "once every 30 mins" isn't all that apparent to me.

Maybe it would be better it was simply a 30-sec or so buff. I mean it is cool that it's a 30 min buff, like if you do a dungeon and finish, get out and go do some so fates or hunts, whatever, you still have a buff. And that in and of itself is kind of neat IMO. But making it a temporary buff would certainly seem to make it more interactive for healers.

no, it is called adding an annoyance.. If they did that, I would have to make sure to cast it before every pull made because it dropping in mind pull can be dangerous. Also it would make ast too busy, as they have to deal with cards with having nonspamable aoe stun.

Also what Serilda said.

End of the day it is either fix protect to make it worthwhile to have it on the hot bar or get rid of it, there is no reason to have it take a role action, on top of things.

[RukiaFae]

No. Get rid of it. It just takes up space. They can change it into somthing else if they like but they should not keep it as it is. It is a waste of space IMO.