!! Fix Healer Rescue

[Packetdancer]

Is there a reason why there shouldn't be a toggle? It's incredibly easy to code and would take virtually no effort for SE. World of Warcraft added a toggle to the same ability for the same reasons.

As many, many, many healers have said in this thread, a toggle would simply prevent Rescue from being used, as healers already track enough things; buffs, debuffs, whether the other AST gave that particular DPS a card yet or not, has the other AST popped Divination recently and so it's a good time to pop yours, or is there a risk they're about to do the same and it'll overwrite. Moreover, in higher-end content people can have enough buffs and debuffs going at once that they actually vanish off the side of the party list, forcing you to select the player to check their full buffs and debuffs.

Rescue's timing is incredibly weird (which is why it is hit-or-miss whether it works or not); in order to have even a chance that it fires properly you need to pop it almost immediately when it becomes clear it'll save someone. If there was a debuff buried somewhere in that list which said "Rescue will not work on this person, just let them die when they stand in the AoE", by the time you could find it and confirm someone had it, it would already be too late to use Rescue.

So—as many, many, many healers in this thread have said—if there was a toggle that meant there was a solid chance that our Rescue ability just arbitrarily wouldn't work based on someone else's decision, rather than seeking the indicator that this DPS has disabled our ability to save them, the majority of us would just assume that they had, remove Rescue from our bars, and use that casting window to do other things.

At which point you would've spent a lot of time and development energy coding a toggle for one ability which would, functionally, have the same effect as just removing the ability would've. Thus, if Rescue is enough of a problem to warrant a toggle, then it makes more sense to just remove it and give healers something else to fill that slot. (Ideally something unique to the role, since literally every healer utility other than the instant reposition of Rescue is shared with some other job.)

This is why I argue that if you want to take the toggle path (solely to allow Rescue to be used in uptime with pre-discussion with others), rather than adding special case code just for Rescue, it makes more sense to examine the toggle functionality more generally and see where else can benefit. That way, the dev time isn't wasted on just one niche situation; Rescue is, after all, far from the only ability in this game that can be used to troll.

(I mean, I think a lot of us could make a solid argument for why RDM LB3 should be able to be disabled in PUG runs of anything involving floor mechanics. It might be a ridiculous argument, but I've died to RDMs trolling by making all floor mechanics invisible with LB3 more often than I've died to someone misusing Rescue.)

Nope, but I do code and I do know that SE already has the functionality coded in this game to disable pull in effects. They only have to flip a switch to turn it on under the right conditions. This isn't complex or layered.

This is an oversimplification. While you're right that knockback immunity status effects exist in game, and so you could hypothetically just make this toggle to that, you're leaving out how those effects are actually implemented and the results this would have on gameplay.

The current effect nullifies far more than Rescue; using knockback immunity makes you immune to many boss knockback and draw-in mechanics. If you just had a toggle to turn the knockback prevention effect on constantly, you're now giving someone 100% immunity to all knockbacks and draw-ins that can be nullified; they only need to disable Rescue to turn that on. Obviously, that's no good; it would be cheesed to the moon and back, as people would just toggle it regardless to prevent all knockbacks.

So let's say you just make it so that when you hit someone with Rescue who has that toggle on, it turns on the effect for, say, five seconds (to avoid the Rescue effect from acting on the person). This is better, right? But you would absolutely have people cheese that, too. After all, it would effectively let you give someone an extra knockback immunity. Have someone disable Rescue, then the healer casts Rescue on them right before a knockback where they want to keep uptime, et voila, they get the anti-Rescue knockback immunity and stay in place without having to eat their Arm's Length; now they have that cooldown still available for a different mechanic later.

(And if you don't think people would cheese things that way with it, your experiences in high-end content are extremely different than mine.)

So, really, for the toggle to function the way you intend specifically, you'd need to make a new status effect which specifically granted immunity to Rescue (say, grants a 100% dodge chance to that one specific ability) rather than having Rescue fire and just blocking the knockback effect. Which is fine, but means you can't use the existing knockback/draw-in immunity code... which means the existence of said effect is sort of irrelevant to implementing this.

You have to write a new method of preventing it anyway.