!! Fix Healer Rescue

[Goji1639]

ctrl+x or ctrl+c is your friend.

And what, paste it in notepad and sit on it?

Simply making a test post and editing it works better.

Ugh, I've gotta stop wasting posts responding to this crap.

[KageTokage]

It makes me sad when I try to rescue a WAR who's about to fail a fatal mechanic only to see a "miss" pop up because they were using Inner Release.

It would make sense to just add the "ignore knockback immunity" flag to it but to also add a toggle to avoid being rescued by people if you'd rather not have it happen. I've been "accidentally" rescued out of my TCJ more times then I'd like to remember.

[Packetdancer]

I'm going to regret coming back into this thread, I know, but... one more attempt.

Right now, the feature as proposed puts the entire burden of the feature on the healers. It's on the healers to see whether or not the Rescue Disable toggle is on (if they want to avoid wasting time on it), and if they would have saved someone out of the bad and the person rejects the Rescue and then dies anyway, the burden of that consequence is on the healers (now needing to spend 2400 MP and Swiftcast to rez someone, where the Rescue would have prevented that).

And even if you come up with a perfect way to communicate the feature being enabled on a player, it still puts the burden of this feature on the healer. If I can save a player from damage and I do, and it works, I no longer have to spend 2400 MP and a Swiftcast to get them back in the game. If I can save a player from damage and I try and they reject it and then die, I as the healer pay the cost of correcting their mistake; it's the equivalent of someone going "Free sandwiches!" and I want to go into the shop, and someone holds me back until they go "Okay, free sandwiches have run out! Full price again!" and then telling me it's okay to go in. You are deliberately costing me something I hypothetically would not have to pay were I free to act.

And 2400 MP isn't something to sneeze at.

So in short, there is additional burden and cost imposed on healers (spotting the status indicator) on top of ensuring they can't save themselves the MP cost by rescuing someone about to die. In contrast, there's no additional cost for those rejecting Rescue (save that maybe you would've been saved if Rescue had gone through, and now if the healer gets you back up you're being rezzed with Weakness instead). If you want to go the toggle route, I think you'll find more people willing to see a toggle as still leaving Rescue viable if the costs/consequences are more equitable.

So, in the interests of trying to make the conversation productive, let me offer this example of what I mean by more collaborative solutions (and a more equitable cost of the choice to reject Rescue):

Let's have the toggle put on a debuff status called Independent. Yes, healers may still miss the status in the status bar in the thick of things when there's a ton of raid buffs and such on the bars (or you're in the Baldesion Arsenal or Delubrum or whatever, somewhere that people colllect status effects like Pokémon), but hey, there'll be an indicator, and having it as a status will make this part easier to code if nothing else.

If a healer uses Rescue on someone who has the Independent debuff, Rescue does not trigger the draw-in effect. Instead, the healer gets a 30 second buff called Salvation Offered while the other player gets a 10 second debuff called Salvation Denied. If a player takes avoidable damage while they have Salvation Denied, the debuff is consumed and they gain a 10 second debuff called Unsaved.

And if a player dies while under the effect of either Salvation Denied or Unsaved, they get a new buff called Second Chance which lasts for 10 seconds.

If a healer has the Salvation Offered buff, using a raise on someone with Second Chance will cost only 1200 MP and be an instant cast (and both status effects will be consumed). However, the person will always be rezzed afflicted with Brink of Death (the harsher of the two rez-penalty debuffs we have in game, the one you get if you're rezzed while still under the effect of Weakness).

For DPS who know what they're doing and are just cutting it close, the upshot is just that they'll get to deny the Rescue without real consequence; they'll avoid the damage on their own, and after 10 seconds they lose the Salvation Denied debuff without ever getting the Unsaved debuff. At which point, if they die, it's normal death mechanics; the healer still has to use Swiftcast and spend full price to rez them, as usual. No cost to the DPS, but as they didn't die, the healer isn't having to eat the consequences of the decision to deny the Rescue.

If the Rescue would genuinely have saved someone, however, now upon taking that damage the healer tried to save them from, the player has Unsaved (or they're on the floor and have Second Chance); if they die as a likely consequence of that avoidable damage, the healer has an "at least you tried to save them" benefit that makes the rez less onerous. (Thus it's still worth attempting the Rescue.)

The Brink of Death instead of Weakness is to avoid people deliberately using Second Chance to cheese things widely; the penalty to the newly-rezzed DPS with Brink is severe enough on its own to discourage it, but not so severe it hasn't already been measured as a reasonable rez-penalty debuff by the devs, since it's already in-game.

Done this way, it doesn't matter if the healer has nameplates off to avoid visual clutter (if there's a nameplate status icon), or if the Independent debuff is readily visible among a number of raid buffs or not, because the healer doesn't have to take on the extra cost of trying to figure out whether or not the person has Rescue toggled off. Because if the healer was right to try to use Rescue, the consequences of being unable to save the targeted player from the incoming damage are shared; the DPS takes a heftier rez-penalty when rezzed, and the healer doesn't get a complete freebie as they still do have to spend 1200 MP to get the player back upright. (But there's a benefit to getting them back into the fight quickly due to the reduced cost and what is functionally a freebie Swiftcast, so it's best not to just leave the person on the floor indefinitely either.)

I think most healers would object less to this sort of an implementation than just "I have disabled Rescue, I reject your efforts to prevent me being on the floor, you just wasted that casting window, and if I die despite this you'll just have to spend your Swiftcast and nearly a quarter of your entire MP pool to rez me." So it's an implementation that benefits both sides.

[Seraphor]

^ While this seems incredibly complicated for what is a simple role action, it does what you set out to do.
Maybe it should be simplified in some way but I kinda like it.

[Packetdancer]

^ While this seems incredibly complicated for what is a simple role action, it does what you set out to do.

The main reason it's complicated in the writeup is that status effects in this game are great at proccing new status effects, but so far as I can observe really terrible at conditional timers. So the most straightforward way to have an "if you take avoidable damage within 10 seconds of the attempted Rescue which leads to your death within 20 seconds of the attempted Rescue" type of condition on the rez effect is really the chained debuffs/buffs that proc off of each other, even if that ends up working out to actually be "if you take avoidable damage within 10 seconds of the attempted Rescue, which leads to your death within 10 seconds of that damage" (sort of akin to how Living Dead procs Walking Dead). :|

(If there's a good way to simplify that which I've overlooked, it probably should be simplified, yes. Maybe do away with the Salvation Offered buff, and just make it so anyone can benefit from the Second Chance buff; then it doesn't have to be the healer who attempted Rescue who gets the person up at reduced rate and freebie instant-cast, it could also be their co-healer, or even the SMN or RDM.)

[Goji1639]

If the cost of rezzing is the big concern then yes, it can be worked around.

Hell, why not just make it so a blocked Rescue makes Revive cost no mana for 10 seconds. Then particularly clever Healers can use the toggle as a mechanic to save themselves mana in an emergency, and will have a beneficial reason to pay attention to who has the toggle on and who doesn't. Statics can even strategically plan to have certain players start the fight with Rescue off so they can be used as Revive buffers.

It would be powerful but doesn't really strike me as being broken. It's just a solid reward for situational awareness. We don't really have to overcomplicate it by trying to counteract the benefits; just make this a flat Healer buff.

[Packetdancer]

Hell, why not just make it so a blocked Rescue makes Revive cost no mana for 10 seconds. Then particularly clever Healers can use the toggle as a mechanic to save themselves mana in an emergency, and will have a beneficial reason to pay attention to who has it on and who doesn't. Statics can even strategically plan to have certain players start the fight with Rescue off so they can be used as Revive buffers.

This could prove powerful enough that folks start insisting on using it during savage prog and such. That's too much cheese in all honesty, and has far larger balance implications.

In my proposal there's still benefit to the healer, as attempting a Rescue will either save the person if they don't have Rescue blocked or if they do and die as a result, it will make getting them back upright less onerous. But the benefit only applies if the specific person rejecting a Rescue dies within a short window after that Rescue (i.e., within a window where you could reasonably assume the Rescue might have saved them), thus mitigating cheese. I can't just have someone who has Rescue off and then attempt to Rescue them so that I can instantly and freely raise some other third party.

Of course, that still leaves it open to cheese where someone goes "well, I usually die during this mechanic; I'll just block Rescue, the healer can try to rescue me, and then when I die it's just cheaper and faster to get me back up". Hence the Brink of Death versus Weakness on rez to discourage that; we do want to make sure that turning off Rescue isn't just a no-consequence path to cheaper rezzes.

(Mind you, if it's someone who dies repeatedly in a given fight and so probably has Brink of Death there anyway? Yes, at that point you could still cheese it for a cheaper rez in comparison. But that seems niche enough not to be overpowered or unbalancing, nor likely to be widely used as a cheese method.)

And for people who know what they're doing and don't want to be repositioned—which, according to most previous threads on this topic, is how the majority of folks who want to disable Rescue classify themselves—there's no added penalty for them; they reposition before the damage goes off and don't die within that window, thus aren't going to be rezzed and receive the higher-penalty rez debuff. From their point of view, they just get to turn off Rescue without any apparent side effects or cost.

[Goji1639]

I'm not too familiar with Savage raids, so I can't say to what extent turning Rescue into a free revive buff would break them. There's almost always a simple solution to issues like this, though.

Like, for instance, you could turn the Rescue off toggle into something that only works in DF, or simply leave it out of whatever the most current prog content is. The problems that people have with Rescue; it being a troll button, incompetent use, etc. aren't really issues for statics running prog anyways. These are issues that are almost exclusively limited to PuGs.

Not to say that your idea wouldn't work, I just feel it's unnecessary to put much effort into 'balancing' this. If this ends up making Healers considerably more versatile in their ability to res then good for them.

[Doozer]

The problems that people have with Rescue; it being a troll button,

There are plenty of things people do in-game that can be used to troll, but those things don't get removed or modified. Players are encouraged to do things like blacklist (if relevant) or submit a report. If someone is using Rescue to troll you, report them instead of ruining the usefulness of it for everyone. Plenty of other things in the game are used to troll, grief, or harass people, that doesn't mean the entire game needs to bend around them. Report them for causing you problems and move on. If it's not worth your time to report them, clearly it's not that big of an issue to you.

People get reported and disciplined for spamming skills in cities, but that doesn't mean the game is changed so no one can use any combat skills in hub areas. Sure you can turn off visual effects, but for some of them the sound is the worst part, which can't be toggled. So, instead, those people can be reported. Get it? There's already a solution: Report them if they troll you.

[hydralus]

People get reported and disciplined for spamming skills in cities, but that doesn't mean the game is changed so no one can use any combat skills in hub areas.[/B]

That'd be fine by me if they changed that, too. In fact it seems like a pretty simple fix.